We're off..

So today we finally set sail on our Maiden voyage. Unfortunately I missed the dedication ceremony, Press conference and the first Sail Away, but I was busy at work with all the final preparations. At 7pm though we opened the Casino and aside from a few minor issues, it was a complete success. Now its buisness as usual and back to running a Casino.
For those of you who don't know, I work on Cruise Ships for the Carnival Corporation in the Casino Dept. For the last couple of years I have been working solely on Holland America Line, which comes under the Carnival umbrella. Last year I was asked to be part of the team who would be setting up the Casino from scratch on a brand new ship being built this year, and I was happy to accept. Although a lot of the ground work, with regards to the purely technical side of it (basically all the wiring and programming) for which I have no expertise, had been done by the time I got there, there was still a hell of a lot of work to be done. All the planning and preparation in the world helps, but is nothing compared to the actual ground work that goes into it. There will always be problems and issues that you can never envision with the amount of parts that must be put into place, especially when you are doing it for an American company, in an Italian Shipyard. So over the last few weeks, we have worked our asses off and today, all our hard work has paid off and we opened. Princess Maxima of the Netherlands (the ships Godmother) made a remark that the Casino looked great on her walk through today, and thats a seal of approval if ever I heard one.
If you want to catch up with how things progressed for me, you can start here. Over the next few weeks, I will try to take various pictures from around the ship, and show you how it all turned out. Tomorrow we are in Dubrovnik and i finally get the day off, with which I am going to sleep for a good deal off and recharge those batterys.
Hope you had a great weekend blippers and a Happy 4th of July to all my American friends.